Judy in Disguise: Doubles, Impostors and Disguises

A double may employ a disguise to look more like his "target." Felix Dadaev, one of Stalin's official doubles, was just in his 20s and was "a great deal younger than Stalin, but make-up and the strain of war meant that he could pass as a 60-year-old..." (WILL STEWART, The man who was Stalin's body double finally tells his story 12 April 2008.) Dadaev recalls that "[b]y the time my make-up and training were complete, I was like him in every way, except perhaps my ears. They were too small." (Id.)

Some pretty convincing results can be accomplished with disguises. A man can be made to appear as a woman, and vice versa. It is even possible to make someone appear to be a different race or ethnic group.

CIA master of disguise, Robert Barron, could make very realistic disguises that could turn people into different races and genders. According to this citation found at http://www.prosthesis.com/about_bob.htm, Robert Barron was

An extraordinary artist and master of the highly specialized craft of personal disguise, Mr. Barron's competency and artistic skills were unmatched. He was the impetus of the advanced disguise system and the ideal by which all other disguise officers are judged in the area of advanced disguise fabrication....

...For over two decades, Barron was a master of disguise who made the fake noses, chins, skin and ears needed to protect the identities of Central Intelligence Agency operatives in the Cold War.

He even created whole faces to make "doubles" -- people who pose as someone else...

"I thought if I could put someone in hiding, which I did in the agency, then a prosthetic device will bring people out of hiding," Barron said.

"If I can change people's identity, I can also give a person his identity back." ...

His spy years gave him the basis for his new career. "When I worked for the CIA I put people in hiding, I changed people's identities and also I made doubles.

"Agents depended on the realism of their disguise to keep them alive, this was my responsibility," he said, refusing to give any specifics of missions behind the communist Iron Curtain...

... He [Barron] once created new faces for undercover CIA spies, but today Bob Barron has turned his talents to those really in need: making prosthetic ears, noses, fingers and nipples for people disfigured congenitally or by accidents or cancer.

For over two decades, Barron was a master of disguise who made the fake noses, chins, skin and ears needed to protect the identities of Central Intelligence Agency operatives in the Cold War. He even created whole faces to make "doubles" -- people who pose as someone else...

His spy years gave him the basis for his new career. "When I worked for the CIA I put people in hiding, I changed people's identities and also I made doubles.

"Agents depended on the realism of their disguise to keep them alive, this was my responsibility," he said, refusing to give any specifics of missions behind the communist Iron Curtain...

... As the CIA's top "master of disguise" for spies and double agents, Bob Barron was well aware of the stakes as he created hundreds of faces and new identities. One suspicious-looking eyebrow or a misplaced ear could lead to fatal results.

"I had to put people in hiding, and I knew the disguise had to pass closest scrutiny of 6 to 12 inches away," he said, adding, "If they didn't have the right disguise, then their life was in jeopardy." ...

Barron is a perfectionist. From capillaries to hair follicles, he nails the details...

... If his work, shown in before-and-after photos on his Web site, appears startling in its verisimilitude, that's because Barron worries the details, down to the hairs visible on an ear and the freckles on a nose. "It's just like in the Agency," he says. "I wouldn't issue [agents] a disguise if their life would be in jeopardy" as the result of a less-than-perfect disguise...

...With [Robert] Barron's help, CIA disguises were soon years ahead of Hollywood's. There was motivation: Espionage wasn't fantasy, but serious business in which an unrealistic eyebrow or false skin tone could be fatal...

Silicone, which can be tinted to look like flesh, came into wide use in the 1970s. Barron could make a Caucasian CIA operative appear Chinese with a mask so realistic the agent could pass undetected within a few feet of a border guard in bright sunlight...

... As necessary, more elaborate disguises using full or partial facial masks could perform an ethnic or sex change to alter a person's racial or gender appearance. among the options are padded clothing to alter body type and weight distribution, sculpted appliances that alter eye color, mouth lines, and affect speech tone, makeup and hair coloring, hand and arm "gloves" to match facial coloring, shoe lifts to add height, and torso devices to create a stooped posture. Individually and in combination, the disguise techniques can affect dramatic appearance change.

For officers in need of a disguise subject to close attention and durable for hours or days, OTS specialists would spend several hours performing the transformations. These labor-intensive disguises were typically applied on individuals in high-risk situations, such as illegal border crossings. Given time, the disguise specialists would alter hair color, apply facial hair, modify jaw lines, improvise dental work, create wrinkles, change complexion, or add glasses and warts to match any photographic documents and thus avoid chance recognition at a border crossing or airport checkpoint...

Sometimes, distractors will be used, such as bad teeth. The teeth draw attention to themselves, & divert attention away from other features.

I think a mustache is a similar visual distraction, and is probably the oldest trick in the book. It's not only a distraction, but it hides the face. "Paul" suddenly appeared in late 1966 with a mustache - a *fake* mustache.

The forensics experts even hinted that the mustache was there to conceal the nasal spine:

[A]lways under the mustache of the McCartney Sgt Pepper's, maybe it was trying to hide something else: what the experts call it the nose-spinal or sottonasale [nasal spine: http://www.revisionrhinoplasty.com/anatomy.html]. This is the point between the two nostrils where the nose begins to fall off the face: "This is also in this case a distinctive feature that medicine cannot alter surgery. It can change the shape of the nose but not the nose-cord," says Gabriella Carlesi. "And McCartney from the first group of photos and the second point that clearly varies”

Update: What They Don't Want You to Know - this podcast from How Stuff Works talks about the CIA using imposter-replacements and features PID. They would really rather people not know about this, but the cat is out of the bag.

ConspiracyJan 1, 4:07 PMOver the past decades, the CIA has been accused of everything from selling guns to assassinating people. Yet that's not the craziest part: Some people believe the CIA is actually replacing its enemies. Tune in and learn more in this episode.

1 comment:

The way 'f'aul's fake ears were so sloppily done makes me wonder if it wasn't a sick sort of 'in your face' type of thing, that gave him and his handlers lots of laughs--but, since almost no one seemed to notice, how much fun could that have been for 'the poor, dear souls'?--I hope none! It's taken decades, and this internet, to finally bring enough of us together to compare notes, and check out pictures we might ordinarily not have been able to view, to begin unraveling this awful mystery--so, maybe now they can go ahead and laugh--I'm just very glad it's "He who laughs last that laughs best", because I fully believe that definitely it won't be them. :)

Also--did Paul begin wearing a wig of his own not long before September, 1966? In that video called "The Walrus", they do show the guy portraying Paul as straightening his wig before going out--I thought at first it was one of those mistakes left in that nobody noticed, but someone else mentioned that she thought Paul had begun wearing a wig not long before he 'disappeared'. In those 4 pictures in which he is apparently showing us the 'see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil' of the 3 monkeys, his hair doesn't look quite like his own--that's mainly why I'm wondering if something might have been wrong, and he had to resort to wearing a wig, even if just occasionally.

This whole thing would never have been able to continue on as it has for the last 50 years if any of us had ever thought for one split second that something so monstrous had actually taken place--as it was, the very idea boggled the mind, and most of us brushed it off and called it nonsense, or a publicity stunt, simply because we thought something like that would never even be possible--and, besides, why would anyone dare try pulling off a stunt like that?--wow, were we wrong!! :(